Open Source ILS: Much Bigger Than You Think

Time and time again I bump into the misconception that free and Open Source ILS like Koha and Evergreen are only for small libraries. While this might have been true for Koha in 1999/2000 it most certainly isn’t in 2012 and hasn’t been for many years now. As for Evergreen, this has never been the case.

Some Evergreen facts to help dispel the myth:

7 Evergreen libraries have over 1,000,000 records in their catalogues.

Georgia PINES has 8.5 million records and circulates approx 18 million items per year.

King County Library system contains over 3.3 million records. The library circulates 19 million items per year and serves a population of 1.2 million residents.

One of the ‘smaller’ Evergreen consortia MVLC has over 3.2 million records in its catalogue.

Some Koha facts:

Koha has 7 Libraries/consortia with over 1 million records in their catalogues and 19 libraries with more than 500,ooo records.